The ‘historic and compelling’ thesis had swiftly become the most-requested item in Cambridge’s open access repository – Apollo.

The university made the essay public at midnight on Sunday to mark Open Access Week after hundreds of readers sent in requests to download Hawking’s thesis in full.

A University of Cambridge spokesperson said: ‘We have had a huge response to Prof Hawking’s decision to make his PhD thesis publicly available to download – with almost 60,000 downloads in less than 24 hours’.